Wow that took a long time…
A little bit of background: Earlier in 2005 I bought a wireless router so that I could use my laptop from work freely around the house. The same applied to my girlfriend’s laptop. Unfortunately, that wireless router fried and even though I can return it for a replacement (Linksys still has an RMA open for it – I just haven’t mailed it yet), we managed to do fine without. But it’s always been a thorn in my side. Why use cables when you can do it wireless?
For Christmas I got a wireless PCI card and the plan was to expand my Linux based router by adding on a wireless subnet. Unfortunately, I’ve spent the past 3 days trying to make it work. I’ve used different firewall distributions, such as Clarkconnect (my favourite), IPCop, and Smoothwall. While I could get the card to run in Clarkconnect using ndiswrapper and the Windows drivers, the configuration just would not take.
So I finally gave in and decided to resolve the problem with a Windows based solution. Yikes, that took me a long time to stoop to that level. In the end, everything works perfectly. I now have a Windows XP based router/firewall running Kerio WinRoute Firewall 6. It serves two subnets, my wired LAN and my wireless LAN which is secured with WEP encryption and locked down to MAC addresses. All this plus the ability to have content filtering, firewall based anti-virus capabilities, and more. I’m quite happy. Too bad it’s Windows though.
PS: I’m posting this from my couch.
